Twinner, Twinner, Chicken Dinner

Author: Pia Mara Finkell

Earlier today, my colleague sent around a useful, but more importantly, really cool compilation of 35 Great Social Media Infographics from a social media marketing blog.

The one that got me thinking the most was this Social Media Statistics infographic demonstrating a study conducted by Pear Analytics, where 2,000 random tweets were analyzed for content. Long story short: the majority of tweets consist of completely pointless babble. Surprisingly, considering the number of companies getting on the Twitter train, only 10% are spam or self-promotional. Not surprisingly, under 10% were considered interesting with pass along value. It’s also interesting to note that conversational tweets were a close second in frequency. In other words, people like to chat on Twitter, putting the social in social media.

So, as a PR professional and active Twitter user concentrating in food and beverage business, what does this mean for me? It definitely means I’ll look to up the ante in my interesting and unique content to stand out in the crowd. For our clients, I’d say our best bet is to strike up some meaningful conversations with all the foodies out there in Twitterland. As a smart colleague once said, participate in the conversation.

Here are some thoughts on how to improve your or your clients’ Twitter communication:

• Be a resource: Tweet useful bits of information and links to educational or interesting blogs and Web sites, or drive people to useful parts of your website for educational purposes. This is an occasion where self-promotion has a purpose.
• Be funny! Encourage retweets and community interaction with a little bit of funny. Humor goes a long way in grabbing people’s attention. A good example: I posted a picture of an empty glass of Rioja and tweeted “Sad Times.” This was retweeted and followers of @RiojaWine went up significantly that day.
• Chat ‘em up: Following people within the foodie community, there are countless opportunities to strike up a conversation. This is grassroots PR at its best, and a great way to engage and create a loyal following. Is this time consuming? Yes sir! Is it absolutely necessary? You betchya.
• Jazz it up a little: Don’t just post words and random thoughts. Post pictures, a GPS location of whatever cool place you’re tweeting about or a link to an interesting article. If you’re sipping a nice glass of wine, take a picture of it, post a review or talk about what you’re pairing it with.
• Make it searchable with #hashtags: This is an oldie but a goodie. Journalists searching for trends and people searching for communities and Twitter friends will more easily find you in the sea of information out there.
• Make friends: This seems obvious, but invite 25-30 followers in your respective community per week. They will follow you back, especially if you follow some of the above rules to tweet by.

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Creating a Successful Web Site

Author: Jason Poulos

Basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques that will help create a successful web site.

1. Site Build

• The web site itself is developed in a manner that allows Google and other search engines to crawl and index the site properly.
• Wordpress has a handful of plug-ins that will help search engines through this process.
• Google Sitemap Plug-in “This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your site. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.”
• All in 1 SEO Plug-in This will allow us to tweak title, keywords and descriptions for each page.

2. Content

• Unfortunately a site can’t just rely on how it’s built for SEO.
• The more content updates you have to your site the better. The more articles, additions and posts to the site the better.
• If search engine bots recognize that your site is full of new relative content, they come back more often. The idea behind these frequent bot visits are to raise page rankings thus getting more traffic to the site via search engines.

3. Networking

• Content needs to be networked and talked about outside of your site.
• Content needs to be pushed/pulled to/from other networks in an effort to generate traffic to your site.

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Crisis Management: Steve Phillips Goes Public in Sex Scandal

Author: Brian Ellis

Today, former ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips came clean. Phillips was involved in a sex scandal (ala Tiger) involving a 22-year-old production assistant last fall. He was immediately fired by the network and the story died. Or, so it seemed. This morning, just a day or two after leaving a treatment program for sex addiction, Phillips surprisingly decided to come clean on the Today Show. What is interesting about his appearance is the fact that not only did he take responsibility for cheating on this wife and kids, he also tried to describe what “sex addition” really means. I’m sure there are many who feel he’s just looking for an excuse, “…ask for forgiveness and move on.” But this morning, Phillips became the face of the issue. It’s a risky move if he hopes to rebuild his career, and one in which you have to question the true motive. He spent a lot of time talking about the need to repair his relationship with his family, which poses the question, was this effort really about saving his marriage, or was it about saving face? While getting out in front of the issue makes sense from a PR perspective, does it really help his kids who will likely face a new round of whispering behind their backs? According to Google’s story “hotness” scale, this story is “on fire.” That’s what happens when you put a little hot air on simmering coals. While it makes Mr. Phillips a hot commodity, I question whether the appearance aligns with his stated goal of winning his family back.  

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Let It Snow!

Author: Natalie Smith

 
photo credit: Greg Timm

 There are two types of people in this world: snow angels and snow crabs.

Snow angels embrace the snow. They eagerly anticipate its coming, stocking up on hot chocolate and brownie mix. They get out their snow gear–and they have a ton of it–so they can be ready for snowball fights and romantic walks in winter wonderland. For them, snow is full of opportunities. It’s a welcome and well-loved friend.

But all that snow just makes snow crabs, well - crabby.  They complain about how messy it looks after the first day. They gripe about the fact that schools are closed and they can’t get to work. They mope about not being able to get to the gym. They whine that they’re cold. For them, snow is something to be simply endured until it goes away.

I admit it–I’m a snow crab. The foot of snow blanketing central Virginia has not made me happy. It’s screwed up my carefully planned agenda and caused me to rearrange my priorities. It’s forced me to think differently about how to accomplish what I need to get done for my clients, colleagues and family. It’s required me to find new tools and new people on whom to rely. It’s made me slow down (gasp!) and think about what I’m doing and how I’m doing it.

But really, is that all bad? Most people rarely take the time to examine what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. In our rush to get things done, we don’t make time to really listen, learn and absorb. But that listening, learning and absorbing is critical to creative ideas and transformational thinking. It’s essential for bringing value to our relationships, whether they be with clients, classmates, coworkers or even family.

I hear we’re going to get wallopped with another snowstorm this weekend. This time, I’ll be prepared. Instead of fretting about what I’m not getting done, I plan to leaf through some art books, dig around on the Web to see what more I can learn about clients’ industries, bone up on  the details of what’s going on with our legislative session, call professional colleagues whom I respect just to chat. I’ll think about different things in hopes that it will spur me to think differently about ordinary things.

With any luck, my inner snow angel will whack my outer snow crab with a great big shovel.

Bring on the snow.

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News Year’s Resolutions

Author: Brian Ellis

Here it is the last week of January and I can already see the New Year’s resolution bandwagon starting to lose members at my local gym. I’ll have to admit, I’m not exactly following my resolution at 100 percent, but a campaign I’m working on is giving me added incentive to stay engaged in my goal of improving my wellness. It’s called America’s Wellness Challenge and you can learn more about it at www.lifesupplemented.org.  Right now we are running a $15,000 sweepstakes to incentivize Americans to take that first step in improving their wellness – kind of like health care reform at home. 

All you have to do is take the free My Wellness Scorecard which measures your  overall wellness. I’ve been a WannabeWELL for years but with the big 50 around the corner, it’s time to make a change.  The best way to lower our health care costs is to take better care of ourselves. Now you have a chance to win $15,000 at the same time!

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